Analysis: MySpace and Bebo Replace Searches for Chat Rooms in the UK

Authored by Heather Hopkins on August 23, 2007 - 3:09am.

I mentioned last week that we are working on some analysis for a report on how consumer search behaviour has changed over the past couple of years. Given the interest in the YouTube-Funny Videos post, I thought I'd share another example. We found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for "myspace" and "bebo" with "chat rooms" and "free chat rooms" over the past two years. The charts below illustrate this nicely.

Bebo and chat rooms.png
myspace and chat rooms.png

One of our readers pointed out that correlation does not equal causation. True and thanks for pointing that out. It does seem howver that as consumers have figured out where to find hang out and chat online, they changed the language of their search queries to navigate to specific social networks. Stay tuned for more results from the analysis.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was first posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.

Flickr photo by Gordon McKinlay

Published in DMW Daily, August 23, 2007

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Comments

Kind of a stretch

Submitted by mobile chat (not verified) on August 24, 2007 - 5:30am.

I think your reader was astute to point out that correlation doesn't equal causation. There are probably lots of searches that are declining in popularity over time but that doesn't mean that Bebo or MySpace is responsible for it.